I just heard on the latest AVRant podcast (titled "Salk and Boston Acoustics...") that iTunes has 256kbps with almost all of their catalog. But since they use AAC compression it is really equivalent to a 312 kbps mp3. I tried google searching to find out iTunes download compressions and such a couple weeks ago and came up empty handed, so I'm glad that I stumbled upon this. Since amazon has 256kbps mp3's it sounds like iTunes offers better quality.